Posted on 21 November 2012

When it comes to writing articles and using them for content marketing, one of the biggest debates that is ongoing is “what length of article is the best”. Is a 1000 word article going to perform better than a 400 word article? And with all the changes that have been going on with Google recently, with the search engine putting a strong emphasis on “quality content”, some may think that longer content will be better for SEO purposes.

But the thing is, there is no standard in terms of number of words that defines what is a “good article”. When you measure how a certain article performs, there are numerous things you need to take into consideration. You need to ask yourself: what do I want this article to do? It could be: clicks to the rest of your website, views to the article in order to build up your brand image and reputation, having the article syndicated on other sites, having others post links to the article or getting an overall better ranking on Google.

A good way to approach the question is to ask yourself: what length is required to discuss the topic of the article? If you’re writing something about the economy or politics, a 1 500 word article may be needed. But if you’re writing about “animal shaped mailboxes made out of recycled organic materials”, chances are if you write 1 500 words, you will either go completely off topic, or start repeating yourself over and over again. This will simply bore the reader.

You should also remember that there will be human readers actually reading the content that you put out. In many cases, they’re not reading things just for fun, but are actually looking for an answer to their questions. In some cases, the answer can be provided in 250 words or less. In some other cases, it will take far more than that. When you do a search, you’ve probably had frustrating results where the page you click on either gives just a few bits of vague information that you already knew, or keeps rambling on and on and on and you have to pay close attention to the content to see whether it will eventually contain what you’re looking for or not.

Proper organization and structuring of the article will also matter greatly. If it’s a “How To” article, having well defined paragraphs, with bullet points that contain concise information will be much more satisfying for the reader than a 4 000 word piece of content that looks like a doctoral thesis on the topic. So for example, if someone wants a guide on how to change a watch battery, remember that they’re not coming to the page to read a history of watchmaking or to read several paragraphs where you critique different styles of watches.

The bottom line is, there is no hard and fast rule for article length. Just like with anything else, basic common sense prevails: it should be long enough for its intended purpose and not more.

Posted on 11 October 2012

Building and maintaining a good online reputation for your company isn’t too difficult. It mainly revolves around using all of the available channels to make sure that positive information about your business and products appears in search results when someone looks up your company name on Google. Here is some more information on what you can do to make this all happen:

Update Your Site and Social Media on a Regular Basis

This is not only good for SEO, but will also help when potential customers research your company. Even if there isn’t anything new going on, you can always update your social media accounts by referring to your current product selection or promotions. This shows users that you’re actively involved in your business.

Link Your Business to Your Personal Social Media Accounts

People also want to know who is behind the company they’re dealing with, especially if they’re going to make a large purchase with you. When you post press releases or articles to directories, include some information about yourself and your role in the company. Also, add your company to your personal profiles on Facebook and LinkedIn. This makes it easier to see who is in charge of your business.

Get Your Products Reviewed by Experts

Having your products talked about in a positive way by industry experts, especially those who have a large following and are well respected for their reviews, is definitely something that can help you with your online reputation. It may not always be easy, especially if you’ve just started out, but if you know someone who does YouTube video reviews or who writes about certain products on his blog, having him review something that you sell will help reassure people that your products are of high quality.

Encourage Your Buyers to Leave Reviews

Link to reviews of your business and products on other sites. Encourage those who have done business with you to leave comments and reviews. You can also have a review section on each of your product pages, but having comments on external sites will be a lot more useful in gaining the confidence of buyers.

Monitor Your Reputation Actively

There are plenty of online services that allow you to get regular updates regarding what is said about your business online. Or, you could simply do a Google search yourself from time to time. Doing so will allow you to see how you’re doing and address any possible problems and complaints before they become problematic.

Be Easily Reachable

Ensure that your customers have ways to contact you should there be something wrong with a purchase they’ve made from you. Respond to their inquiries in a rapid and professional way. Take care to resolve any problem, no matter how small the amount involved is or whether you feel that it’s the buyer’s fault. This will reduce the chance of them complaining about the whole situation to other people online and will give you the chance to have a satisfied customer instead of a disgruntled one.

Posted on 28 September 2012

On the web, your website’s content is what will convince your website visitors to become paying customers of yours. Have poor quality content on your site and no matter how good your products may be, you will be causing many customers to flee to somewhere better. Yesterday, we’ve seen a few types of content that you may want to include on your website. Here are some more examples that will help you transform your website into a useful vehicle for acquiring new sales:

Optimized landing pages

The landing page is the first thing a visitor sees when they click on one of your ads. This is really the reason as to why you should work hard on creating landing pages that are efficient. The landing page should give sufficient information on the product to entice the buyer to make a purchase. It needs to be laid out in a neat way and keep the visitor’s attention focused on the content. Also, a clear call to action needs to be present.

Are your landing pages giving you the results that you want? The easiest way to find out is by trying out several versions and then split testing them to see which ones perform the best. Your landing page should be optimized for SEO and also have interesting content elements such as inforgraphics or video if you want it to have the maximum impact.

Industry specific guides and glossaries

Not everyone that visits your website is sure that the products you offer are right for them. If you sell something that’s simple enough, such as clothing and accessories, a user can simply browse through your site a bit to see if they like any of the items you have available. But in case you have products that are a bit more complicated, such as business telecommunication solutions, including some explanatory materials is definitely recommended.

You should give your visitors a good idea of how the technology that you’re selling works, which types of applications it is suitable for, as well as arguments that will try to convince the visitor that your products are right for them. Including a glossary which explains common industry terms is also recommended.

By having all of that on your site, you will transform it into an authority site, that has all the information that a visitor needs when they want to find out more about your niche. This will save them the trouble of bouncing around different websites as they do research to find if your products are right for them. Remember that if a visitor needs to access outside sources of information, they could see an offering for a competitors product, or get “lost” and forget that they’ve visited your site in the first place. Obviously, this can result in lost sales opportunities for you, but this can all be prevented by having the maximum amount of information available all on your website.

Posted on 06 September 2012

In an increasingly mobile world, an equally increasing number of users from all demographics are now using smartphones to find what they need. We have seen before that a great amount of searches made by mobile users result in a purchase being made by the person using the smartphone. Local business owners, as well as the online marketing experts responsible for promoting these businesses need to know all about mobile marketing and how they can harness its power. It gives businesses a great opportunity in the online world, but mobile marketing needs to be done right for it to be effective.

Here are some tips that will be useful:

Have a mobile compatible site

We’ve probably gone through this about a hundred times in the past year, but it’s worth repeating. Your business site needs to be mobile compatible if you want to benefit from smartphone traffic. It’s simple to do if you know the right tools, many of which are available for free. Too much trouble? Not good in web design? Just hire an affordable freelancer who could make a good site for $50 to $100. It will be worth it. Your site content should be direct and to the point. Yes, do include calls to action and a good sales copy, but keep the fluff to a minimum and save the purely informational stuff for your blog. While smartphone users do conduct research, it is SHORT research and they just want the basic attributes of your products. It’s highly unlikely that putting the history of your company on your homepage will have much influence on a mobile user’s decision.

Local SEO and targeting is of utmost importance

When someone searches for a product on a smartphone, they usually need something local to them. If you use paid advertising services, geotarget your ads appropriately. If you do SEO, make sure that you do the right local SEO which will help users within range of your business to find its site.

Put a map on your mobile site

Some who are looking for your business may not be familiar with the area. Google Maps is your friend here. Include a map on your website, as well as the option for the user to get driving directions to your location. This increases the chance the user will go to your business first before checking out any competitors. If they have a map on their site and you don’t… guess what… you lose.

Have a call button too

Sometimes the user will want to call your business first. Having a phone number on your site is good, and obviously something you should do. But what’s even better? A “Call Us Now” button that when pressed will cause the smartphone to automatically call you. This makes it simpler for the user to get in touch with you.

Add your business to local directories and social media

Add your business to social media sites, local business directories and place a few classified ads. This will not only help with SEO, but further increase the chances that a smartphone user will become aware of your business and use its services.

Posted on 15 August 2012

One of the questions that comes up very often in online marketing forums is something similar to this: “I own a business in such and such industry. What is the best way for me to do internet marketing?” The problem with that question is that there is often no one specific answer to it. The world of online marketing is a very vast and diverse one, with many methods, techniques, tools and services that you can use to accomplish your goals, whether these are to get more visitors to your sites, to promote a specific product that you’re selling, or to get more exposure for your business.

The exact methods that you use will largely depend on who you are and what you’re trying to do online. But in the majority of cases, it is not just one marketing method that should be used, but a combination of several of them. What will be variable, however, is the degree of attention that you will give to each of these methods.

If you’re trying to get your business more recognized and known as the leader in its field in your local area, then using search engine optimization is a must, as you will need to ensure that people who search for what you have to offer will be able to find your business. A large number of people use search engines when shopping for something, so it is imperative that your site can be easily found by them. But SEO is not the only way to do this. If you want the best results, you should use a few complementary methods to get the word out.

You can, for example, make posts on local online classified ads websites. Or you could buy advertising space on websites that are related to your niche, or frequently visited by people from the area served by your business. To gain more visibility, it would also be a good idea to create pages for your company on the popular social networking services.

Once you see that you are getting results, you can keep your website visitors interested in what you offer by offering an email newsletter that they can subscribe to. You can also create a blog where you keep users updated on new happenings in your industry, as well as new products that your business has to offer them.

As you can see, there isn’t really a “quick” solution to marketing a local business on the internet. You should spend some time putting together a complete online marketing strategy where you will think about your goals, as well as the methods that you want to use to accomplish them in the online world. Remember that it is also important to keep track of your progress, as this will let you know which areas of your marketing plan are working well and which others may need a little bit more attention so that you can improve them and make them work as efficiently as possible.

Posted on 27 July 2012

When talking about SEO, we often here the words: content is king. This leaves many webmasters thinking about how they can improve the quality of the content that they have on their site so they can rank better in search results. Now that Google has released several updates which reward sites that have good content and penalize the bad ones, this has become even more important for webmasters. Here are some easy tips that will help you improve the content of your site, giving your visitors a better and more rewarding user experience, plus helping you rank better for your chosen keywords. Remember that while on page factors aren’t the only thing that will determine just how well a website will rank, they still remain an important piece of the puzzle. With the recent search engine updates focusing on quality, they are something that you simply cannot afford to ignore if you want your online business to succeed.

Adhere to SEO Writing Best Practices

There are dozens of guides and articles which explain what SEO writing is and give detailed explanations on some of the good practices that webmasters can adopt. In summary, this would mean using your keyword within the title of your pages or posts when possible. Use your keyword near the beginning, in the headings and in the end of your page. Your keyword should also be included a few times in the body of the article as well. But one important thing here is that you shouldn’t over do it. Keyword stuffing is one of the fastest ways to get a site penalized right now. If you feel that you’re repeating a certain word or phrase all too often, then this would be a good time to look up some related keywords that you can use instead, to keep your site from being penalized. Not all keyword stuffing is intentional, so this is why you need to pay attention to it when you create content for your site.

Make Your Site Easy to Navigate

A well organized website will make your users much happier. It will make search engines happier as well. For this reason, you should organize the posts on your website in different categories. That way, users can more easily navigate within your site to find some of your other posts. If you’re referencing something that is being discussed in greater detail in another area of your site, linking to it internally is also a good idea. With recent updates, search engines have gotten a lot better at determining which website would provide the user with a good browsing experience and which one would simply be a mess filled with broken links and pages that are difficult to find.

There are plenty of other things that you can do to improve your site’s content when it comes to SEO writing. Tomorrow we will discuss some more tactics that you can adopt. These are all things designed to give your site a boost in search engine rankings and above all, keep it from being pushed down.

Posted on 26 July 2012

The Google Penguin update, if you haven’t heard of it, has been released 3 months ago. The main purpose behind the update doesn’t really deviate that much from the goals that previous Google updates had: to reward websites which have good content and provide an overall good experience for their users, while penalizing sites which rely on black hat tactics such as link spamming or keyword stuffing.

When you talk about SEO, then the keywords will obviously be something very important. Previously, giving a lot of consideration to keyword density, as well as the placement of keywords within a page were seen as very important things for any webmaster or online business owners. But this part of the SEO game has changed a bit, as Google is trying to eliminate the “spammy” site from its rankings. Placing your keywords in the title of your content, as well as close to the beginning, is still a good practice. However, webmasters now need to focus more on diversifying their keywords. This means using related words and phrases when possible, rather than just reusing the same words over and over again. Using related keywords will also make the text flow better and look easier to read to a human, which is something that Google wants.

Of course, it is not only on site factors that have changed since the Penguin updated rolled out in April of 2012. Google is now trying to better determine the overall quality of a website by analyzing the link profile. This simply means how many links a website has, where the links are coming from, how much the links have grown recently and what anchor text is being used on these links. It is believed that the anchor text is going to get a lot more attention with Penguin. This is to deter would be comment and link spammers from posting a site link with the same anchor text hundreds, or thousands of times all over the web with the hopes that this will improve the site’s rankings, as it is getting more backlinks.

Of course, this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t work on creating backlinks anymore, but there might be a few changes that you may want to do from now on. The main thing to focus on is diversifying your anchor texts. Don’t simply use one keyword for all of your incoming site links. This is one of the fastest ways that you can get your site penalized under the new update. Rather, try to vary that text as much as you can. If you leave comments on forums or blogs, make sure that your comment is not only relevant to your website, but also to the site where you’re posting it on. Generic comments, such as “nice site” or “I agree” may have worked a few months ago, but Google is increasingly cracking down on them, as they simply pollute the comment sections of many blogs by offering nothing that is of value to the discussion.

Posted on 18 July 2012

Previously, we’ve looked at the American Customer Satisfaction Index details for social networking giant Facebook. The conclusion is that even if it is the most widely used social networking service currently online, this doesn’t mean that its users love the service, as they have complaints about some areas of it. But still, numbers show that the majority of people who have a Facebook account aren’t planning on closing it or moving their main social activities to another network, mainly because there isn’t any serious competition… yet.

But what about Google + ? The social network from Google has seen its share of controversy and many would argue that they were off to a rather rocky start. Whether or not marketers should use Google + at all has been a topic of rather intense debate around online marketing circles, but right now it has finally been settled. Small business owners and online marketers seem to agree that presence on Google + has a lot of advantages that outweigh the negative issues about the service, most notably better exposure to consumers in certain markets, as well as the potential for better results in SEO, as this is after all a Google service and Google is the biggest search engine.

Now that we know how marketers perceive the service, why don’t we find out how the individual users liked it? The results would surprise many. On the American Customer Satisfaction Index, Google + got the best grade out of all the networks. It beat Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Linked In by a relatively wide margin. Google + got a score of 78. Pinterest got 68, Twitter got 64, Linked In 63 and Facebook 61. The Index measures responses from customers of these networks based on various user experience factors. Google’s score shows quite a few things;

First, it’s obviously not perfect, but at least it’s much better than the competition and surprisingly a whole lot better than Facebook. Since individual consumers seem to love Google +, marketers need to immediately take this into consideration and take appropriate action. For those who haven’t yet joined the service, it just takes a few minutes to set up an account for your business. There is very little for you to lose and a whole lot to gain. Setting up a basic profile, with details and maybe a few pictures can be done in less than 15 minutes. For those who have an account, but it’s mainly just a placeholder, now would be the time to get things going on Google +. Upload some more content. Put up a few posts, or maybe photos related to your business. Share links and articles that are relevant to your industry. Remember, it doesn’t have to be completely new stuff, all you need to do is to link to content already on your site if you want to.

But what makes Google + so well received in the public opinion? We will take a more detailed look tomorrow.

Posted on 03 July 2012

Creating good engagement with your visitors is important for various reasons. First, it helps you build a connection with the people who visit your website, giving you a better chance of converting visitors into sales. Also, with the updates to the way Google ranks websites, pages which feature ways for visitors to interact with the site may receive a better position in search results. Yesterday, we’ve seen some ways to accomplish that. Here are some more methods that webmasters and marketers can use to better connect with their audience:

Include social bookmarking buttons and RSS feeds

Social networking sites like Facebook are one way that your visitors can subscribe to your website and receive its updates. But that’s not the only way. There is also RSS feeds and social bookmarking services like Digg. Including the relevant buttons on your site can be helpful.

Have a “contact us” form on your site

Sure, your visitors can call you or send you an email at the address listed on your site. But why not make it easier for them? By including a contact form on your website, you make it more likely that someone who has a question about one of your products will get in touch with you, as this requires less effort from the user.

Put a live chat button

Being available, at least during business hours, to answer your visitors questions can go a long way as far as getting conversions goes. If someone isn’t too sure how one of your products works or whether it will be suitable for them, a live chat button will allow them to get a fast answer. It also shows that your site is good not only at selling things, but at providing customer service as well.

Include an e-mail capture box

This lets people subscribe to receive updates about your website and business by email. Remember that email is still a powerful marketing tool and an excellent way of communicating with your potential and current buyers.

Have a discussion forum on your website

This may not work for all sites, but it can sometimes be a good way of getting to know your site visitors and to provide them with helpful information. It will also help fill your site with free user generated content that can be quite helpful as far as SEO is concerned.

These are just a few ways that you can use to create more engagement from your website visitors. Of course, these are just examples in general and not all of these ideas may suit your business. The main idea is that your site should be easy for your visitors to get around on and they should also have easy ways to subscribe to your updates and get in touch with you. Remember that visitor engagement is just one piece of the overall SEO puzzle. You will still need to work on other elements, such as on site and off site factors that make your website rank better.

Posted on 02 July 2012

Yesterday, we’ve seen that SEO is not dead yet and it will remain very much alive for a long time. There are, however, a few changes made by how Google evaluates the quality and relevance of websites when deciding which sites get to rank best for their keywords. One of the things that are the most talked about on SEO blogs (the normal ones, not those who claim SEO is dead and who try to sell you some traffic generation “tool”) is the importance that Google is giving to user engagement with a website.

User engagement is simply a way to say that website visitors are interacting with the website’s content. Sites which allow more opportunities for interaction are not only better seen by Google, but they are also more liked and respected by visitors themselves, thus giving you more opportunities for sales, whether you’re an affiliate or you got your own products that you’re selling.

Here are some tips to create better engagement:

Let users review or rate your products

This can mean letting them leave actual comments about a certain product, or simply give ratings, such as a number of stars or a grade from 1 to 10, either for the product in general or for certain attributes unique to the product (quality, price, functionality, etc.) Allowing reviews is a good way to earn trust from your users, as a site that deliberately sells junk or is scamming buyers will not want to let users say what they think publicly as they would get rapidly flooded with complaints and bad comments.

Allow commenting on blog posts and articles

Blog / article comments are a way to exchange with your readers. Some of them may simply say that they liked what you wrote, while others may have a question or reaction that you may want to respond to. More participation from your users, and a better chance at a good ranking on Google. Of course, there is the issue of spam or potential trolling/flaming/general idiocy in comments. But a good automatic spam detection tool and checking the responses each day to remove anything that is not a productive comment can go a long way. After all, unless you manage a huge site with tens of thousands of daily visitors, you are unlikely to get more than a dozen or so user comments a day, which makes it easy to keep tabs on things.

Include social networking features

Social networking buttons, for the major social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, Google +, etc. is now becoming a must. Yes, don’t forget Google +. While there is still some debate going on about whether creating a Google + account will truly bring noticeable changes as far as SEO is concerned, general consensus is that it helps slightly and in any case will not hurt you. So include sharing buttons on your content pages, as well as general buttons that lead to your business social media profiles, allowing your visitors to subscribe to your updates through their chosen social network.

There are a few other ways to increase engagement which we will see tomorrow.

Posted on 03 May 2012

Now that you know some ways to ensuring that your social media profile can be a good business tool, here are some more tips that you can use to ensure that it will always stay a valuable asset to you.

Be Clear About What You Do

For some business types, it can be pretty self evident. But for others, you need to ensure that your description details the specialty services that you provide. For example if you run an online marketing firm, you can give details as to the type of services that you provide, such as SEO, on site advertising, etc. That way, your profile visitors will have an immediate idea of what services you provide.

Keep Your Page Updated

Keeping your page updated on a regular basis has many benefits. For your end customers, it can keep them interested in your business and make them want to keep coming back to be repeat buyers. It can also keep them up to date on new products and developments that you’re making. For those who may want to partner up with you or offer a valuable product or service to you, keeping your social networking pages updated serves to show that your business is “alive”. This will increase the chances that someone will contact you about it.

Start By Getting Some Connections

Creating a page on a social media site for your business is not really difficult. In fact, it can be done in just a few minutes. But one of the harder parts would be to get people to like, follow, connect, or whatever term the social network you’re on currently uses to denote the fact that someone has subscribed to your page and will be receiving its updates. Of course, it goes without saying that if you’re the only one that sees your page, it won’t be too useful.

Getting customers to follow you on social media involves various strategies such as putting up buttons on your website, etc. But what about getting other business people to pay attention to you? Start by making your employees, clients and current partners to like your page. This will give you a bit of exposure to begin with.

Another good way to get more people to see your page and subscribe to it is to participate in discussion forums that deal with your industry. You will get to connect to like minded people and many of them would be interested in networking with other entrepreneurs in their industry. Include your social media link in your forum profile or signature, as allowed by the forum.

Link Your Personal Account and Your Business One

This is quite easy to do. On Facebook, for example, all that you would do is to like your business page. You can also add a link to it under the “occupation” section of your personal profile. Again, this will serve to give more exposure to your business page.

Posted on 02 May 2012

If you want to use social media to its fullest potential, you have to understand that it can be used to help you discover more business opportunities, as opposed to simply giving you access to more customers who will buy your products. But are there any secrets to successful use of social media websites to be able to advance your business? Not really, they’re more like common sense tips that can help give you a big boost. Despite some of these tips being quite common, many business owners still don’t follow them and thus don’t get the results that they could have gotten from social networking use.

Be Present on Many Networks

Your business should be present on the most common networks, such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google +. Depending on the type of company that you’re running, there could be some smaller or local websites that you could benefit from using. This will give you a maximum amount of exposure at very little cost. Furthermore, having profiles on different websites can have some good SEO benefits for you, as social networking sites are usually well respected on search engines like Google.

Ensure That Your Contact Information Can Easily be Found and Is Up to Date

While this may seem like something quite obvious, there is still a large amount of business owners that neglect to do this. Your profile should include a link to your main website, of course. But make sure that the link actually works and that you’ve typed the site URL correctly. Put in your other contact information in your profile, such as your email, phone and street address. Contact information can change, especially for smaller businesses. This is why you will want to be sure that the information you have on your profile is always up to date. Having incorrect contact information on your profile page can cause you to miss many opportunities. Furthermore, if people see that the contact details between your website and your different profiles found online is different, this could lead to confusion, which is something that you would want to avoid as much as possible.

Include Your Business Logo

This just gives you page a more professional look. If you don’t have a logo for your business, then you can ask a freelancer to create one for you. You can find logo creation services and other simple artwork services offered on cheap freelancing sites such as Fiverr, where you can get one done for just $5. Of course, you can always take a graphics program and create one yourself if you’re able to. It doesn’t have to be anything complicated and could be just your business name in stylized text.

There are some more tips about using social media for business that you can benefit from. Tomorrow we will give you some more useful advice on how you can turn your social media profile into a tool that can make your company shine and let you find new business partners.

Posted on 18 March 2012

When it comes to SEO, whether it’s for blog or any other type of website, everyone knows the importance of having a good linking strategy. Now most people associate linking with building backlinks. These are the links that are found on external websites which point to your blog, or to specific pages that you have on your blog. So if one of your articles gets referenced on another blog, or if you include the URL to your blog on your social media profile, for example, then this would be a backlink. Having plenty of good quality backlinks is widely known to have SEO benefits for any website and this is why plenty of people devote a lot of time and attention to getting them.

Of course, since they are useful for SEO, this is not a bad thing. However, there are other considerations that would need to be taken by those who would like their blogs to rank better in search engines. This would be the internal linking, or how pages on your blog are linked together.

One of the top reasons as to why internal linking is good is that it will help search engine spiders navigate your blog a lot easier. By making the job more simple for them, you will increase the chances that your pages get indexed a lot faster. Another element is the user experience. A proper internal linking strategy means that your readers will be able to quickly find what they’re looking for in your blog. They’re also more likely to spend time on your blog reading other entries, which can increase interest in your blog, grow your ad revenue and also increase the chances that content will be shared. A reader may not think the first post that they were reading was worth sharing on Facebook, for example, but they may like another one of your posts that they’ve clicked on and share that.

Good internal linking is easier than building external backlinks. Simply put, if you refer to a topic that was covered in a previous post, link to it and use the appropriate anchor text. Furthermore, if your blog allows readers to navigate to next or previous posts, then don’t leave this text as the default setting. Instead of using “next”, you should include the actual title of the blog post that the reader will be sent to as anchor text.

Another of the important things to remember is that you need to structure your blog well. Every page should have a link back to the home page. Also, your posts should be categorized according to what topic they are covering. This will not only help the readers find specific information that they may be interested in, but it has also shown to be helpful with SEO, as a blog that has posts in different categories is seen as being more of an “authority” in its niche by the search engines.

Posted on 17 March 2012

Many of us would wish that blogs which are filled with original and well written content would simply rank well on search engines, just like a business that provides high quality products and services to their customers would wish that their website would rank well on Google just because of that. But unfortunately, in the real world this is not how SEO works.

Before you begin thinking about SEO, you should know that your primary focus as a blogger is to deliver the content that your audience will love. It’s possible to incorporate SEO elements into good quality articles on your blog and even to make a few easy changes to existing ones. However, don’t simply write with SEO in mind. You may achieve good page rankings, but if your visitors don’t find the content to be any use to them they simply won’t want to return anymore.

For on page factors, the majority of your on page work will revolve around using the right keywords in the right place. The first thing you need to do is your keyword research. Think of the keywords that your readers will be using if they’re going to be searching for information that you cover in one of your blog articles. Make a list of these words and use keyword research tools to find alternatives as well.

One thing that can help with keyword research is to analyze the competition. If there are other pages out there which have information that is similar to what you’re offering, you need to see what keywords will find it. What keywords are your competitors currently targeting and how well do they rank for these keywords?

Once you have your list of keywords, you will want to figure out how to integrate this in your pages. A lot of people here make a mistake and believe that simply cramming as many keywords as possible in their blog posts will make their posts rise through search engine rankings like they were under some kind of magician’s spell. While this might have worked 10 years ago, keyword stuffing will not help you anymore today. Furthermore, it will also cause problems for the content of your blog. This is because blog articles which have keywords that were forced in will be hard to read and may actually cause you to be penalized by search engines.

Include your main keywords in the first and last sentences of your blog post and use them when appropriate in the main body. Also, use the keywords as much as possible in the title, the heading tags, in the permanent link of the blog post, in internal links to other related articles, as well as in alt tags.

There are also a few other things that will help you with your SEO efforts and can propel your blog through the search engine rankings. Tomorrow we will go through the importance of having a proper external and internal linking strategy.